Pride Month

Tammy Baldwin became the first openly LGBTQ+ woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1999 and to the U.S. Senate in 2013. Senator Baldwin earned her J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1989. She was an attorney in private practice from 1989 to 1992. She first entered political office in 1986, at the age of 24, when she was elected to the Dane County, Wisconsin Board of Supervisors, a position she held until 1994. She then went on to be elected to the Wisconsin Assembly, where she served three terms, and then successfully ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998, also becoming the first woman elected to either chamber of Congress from Wisconsin. Senator Baldwin has advocated for healthcare equity, LGBTQ+ rights, and gun safety measures. 

On March 4, 2013, the U.S. Senate confirmed Judge Pamela K. Chen to serve as a U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of New York, making Judge Chen the first openly gay, Asian-American person to preside on a federal bench. Judge Chen received her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, and started her career at Arnold & Porter and then practiced at the criminal defense law firm of Asbill, Junkin, Myers & Buffone. From 1991-1998, she served as a trial attorney in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. She joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York in 1998 and — apart from a four-month stint in 2008 as Deputy Commissioner for Enforcement for the New York State Division of Human Rights — held many supervisory positions, including Chief of the Civil Rights Section and Deputy Chief of the Public Integrity Section. At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Judge Chen worked with the office’s then-nascent anti-human trafficking program, later describing it as “the most gratifying work I’ve done as a lawyer.”

“How strongly must we love to withstand [these] terrible wrongs.”

Attorneys Menaka Guruswamy and Arundhati Katju successfully advocated for the decriminalization of homosexuality in India, resulting in the unanimous Supreme Court decision to repeal the 155-year-old colonial law in 2018. The decision also granted LGBTQ+ Indians the rights and protections of the country’s constitution and served as a critical precedent for other non-Western nations, including Botswana, which, in 2019, cited India’s decision in reversing its own law criminalizing homosexuality.

Guruswamy and Katju are graduates of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Guruswamy studied law as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, earning a doctorate degree in 2015. After practicing law for 11 years, Katju received an LLM from Columbia University in 2017, where she was a Human Rights Fellow and a James Kent Scholar.